Theologies of Failure

Roberto Sirvent, Duncan B. Reyburn, Duncan Reyburn, Roberto Sirvent, Duncan B. Reyburn

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781532600777
  9781532600791
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532600784
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

What does failure mean for theology? In the Bible, we find some unsettling answers to this question. We find lastness usurping firstness, and foolishness undoing wisdom. We discover, too, a weakness more potent than strength, and a loss of life that is essential to finding life. Jesus himself offers an array of paradoxes and puzzles through his life and teachings. He even submits himself to humiliation and death to show the cosmos the true meaning of victory. As David Bentley Hart observes, "most of us would find Christians truly cast in the New Testament mold fairly obnoxious: civically reprobate, ideologically unsound, economically destructive, politically irresponsible, socially discreditable, and really just a bit indecent." By incorporating the work of scholars working with a range of frameworks within the Christian tradition, Theologies of Failure aims to offer a unique and important contribution to understanding and embracing failure as a pivotal theological category. As the various contributors highlight, it is a category with a powerful capacity for illuminating our theological concerns and perspectives. It is a category that frees us to see old ideas in a brand-new light, and helps to foster an awareness of ideas that certain modes of analysis may have obscured from our vision. In short, this book invites readers to consider how both theology and failure can help us ask new questions, discover new possibilities, and refuse the ways of the world.

1.

Theologies of Failure

An Inadequate Introduction

Duncan B. Reyburn and Roberto Sirvent

“I never failed once. It just happened to be a 2000-step process.”

—Thomas Edison.

Failure, by its usual definition, refers to what falls short of a standard or does not conform to an ideal. Its mere presence announces a dichotomous relationship with its obvious opposite, success, and other synonyms of success: attainment, triumph, victory, and so on. In everyday usage, failure tends to resonate with pejoratives like collapse, loss, negligence, omission, dysfunction, dissolution, and defeat. Whatever we might conceive of as a failure depends a great deal, therefore, on the standard or ideal that we have in our sights.

It would be fair, for example, to distinguish between bad apples and good apples, since we have in mind an ideal—the form of the good apple—and thus a logical desire to balance the symbolic equation. However, misunderstanding the ideal or choosing the wrong ideal may lead us to make any number of false comparisons, and thus also to draw erroneous conclusions. G. K. Chesterton explains, via a metaphor, that we perceive falsely if we “think first of a Briareus with a hundred heads, and then call every man a cripple for having only one.”1 The point he makes is simple enough: if the ideal we measure something against is poorly selected, or if the analogical relationship between something in one category and something in another is misaligned, we will end up denigrating something unjustly; we will, at a fundamental level, misunderstand its very being.

The possibility that we might be setting up deceitful comparisons—comparing, as it were, apples with oranges—points out that the category of failure is not nearly as univocal as it may first appear. Failure can be said in many ways. Its meaning may turn out to be equivocal, for instance, in which case a precise value judgement about its quality or outcome would be difficult to make. And beyond the equivocal is the dialectical sense; and beyond that is the paradoxical or, to follow William Desmond, the metaxological. It may, in other words, include various meanings while also suggesting an inevitable surplus of meaning. Failure, in this paradoxical sense, points beyond itself, to more than itself, to what transcends failure completely—to the very context within which a dialectic between failure and success is established.

Failure may even have, in its paradoxical form, sacramental value. The broken body or text reveals a divine reality beneath and/or beyond the obviousness of our human assignments of meaning. This is demonstrated, for instance, in the paradoxical idea that what is regarded as a failure according to one standard or articulation may end up being a roaring success according to another. Failure is, if not entirely then at least to a significant degree, in the eye of the beholder.

The paradoxical voice of failure is wonderfully, if incompletely, captured in James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes, a book with the tag line, “To err is human. To err enough to fill a book isn’t.” In that book, Acaster, a comedian by profession, recalls numerous life events that he refers to as “scrapes.” Scrapes can be thought of as misfortunes that are nevertheless—and perhaps to the reader’s relief—funny. After 300 pages of recounting a variety of personally experienced disasters, many of which had been owed to his own inability to properly consider his options and their possible consequences,2 Acaster concludes:

I once saw a poster in an office that read, “Your best teacher is your last mistake” and it filled me with pride. I may not have gone to university but my god, have I been educated. My professors were a skydiving instructor, a French porcelain salesman, a nobhead named Alistair and a nine-year old boy with unlimited access to cabbages. They are the ones who set my exams. And yes I failed those exams but in failing them I actually passed them because that’s the way you pass an exam about mistakes—you fail. And all the people who “pass” the exam are the ones who actually fail the exam in the end. But in doing so maybe they also end up passing them because they failed. I don’t work on an exam board; maybe everyone passes because everyone fails. And isn’t that what life is all about? We are all failures and as such we are roaring successes. Each and everyone of us.3

There is something in failure, as Acaster alludes, that points beyond itself; that transcends itself, and thus reframes and rearticulates failure as something beneficial rather than detrimental. Not all failures work like this, of course, but some failures do. As many of Acaster’s so-called scrapes reveal, failure is paradoxical also in the sense that it is something we avoid even though the seeds of failure can be found in many of the things that we actively seek out.4 This is to say that, while trying to avoid failure, we are always moving towards it. Sometimes, in fact, the avoidance of failure, the very tentativeness of our steps towards any given goal, may exacerbate failure. Every movement towards success is always potentially a movement towards failure. This is evident, too, in Viktor Frankl’s notion of “paradoxical intention,” which suggests the possibility that it is precisely in striving for a goal that we ensure that the goal will not be reached. The more we might try to be happy, for example, the less likely it will be that we acquire happiness. And the more we try to control the world, the more it will spin out of control. Sometimes, it is precisely because we reach out for success that we fail. And yet not trying at all may render failure in even more catastrophic terms.

One example of a confusion of failure and success is found in reference to the so-called “Citizen Kane of bad movies,”5 Tommy Wiseau’s The Room (2003). According to generally accepted standards of good filmmaking—coherence in narrative, crisp dialogue, originality of content, consistent character motivation, realism in portrayal, etc.—it is quite simply a filmic disaster. But this apparently terrible creative production is more talked about and widely enjoyed today than the film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture in the year that The Room was made and released.

The Room is acclaimed for various reasons, including its sheer entertainment value, its usefulness as a tool for educating new filmmakers, and its ability to unmask Hollywood vacuity. To this day, some speculate that everything in the film was put there deliberately by Wiseau to challenge the success standards of the American film industry. Since this is merely speculation, it cannot be taken entirely seriously, but it raises the oxymoronic possibility of a successful failure—a failure that succeeds precisely by virtue of being a failure. Others argue, of course, that even if everything in the film were to have been intentionally put there, there are more or less objective standards of excellence that must have escaped the notice of its creators. So even if it succeeds on one level, and succeeds by virtue of being a failure, it still fails completely in other respects. This reveals that failure and success can exist simultaneously, unified in a paradoxical coincidence of opposites.

In The Disaster Artist (2013), authors Greg Sestero (who acted in The Room) and Tom Bissel have a lot to say about failure, either directly or by implication. In their book we find these words: “The Room is a drama that is also a comedy that is also an existential cry for help that is finally a testament to human endurance. It has made me [Sestero] reconsider what defines artistic success or failure. If art is expression, can it fail? Is success simply a matter of what one does with failure?”6

This is simplistically put and philosophically naive. Art cannot be defined as mere expression. Cussing after stubbing one’s toe accidentally is expression, but it certainly isn’t art. Still, the example of The Room remains instructive and complements the idea at the heart of the present collection of essays, which is that often failure is the very thing that throws into question the dialectic of success and failure. In this sense, failure functions as rhetorical defamiliarization.7 By throwing our familiar perspectives into question, it allows us to see things anew, as if for the first time. This is precisely the defamiliarization at work in much of the present book.

Of course, many have already written about failure, and considered it from various perspectives, often in keeping with failure’s many voices. Scott Sandage, for instance, has written extensively on failure in terms of its historicity in Born Losers. Sandage notes, for instance, that the now commonplace reference to failure as something that can be applied to human subjects is a very recent historical intrusion.8 Failure had been, prior to the mid-eighteen hundreds, a term applied to business, rather than a metaphor applied to the denigration of people. Thus, economics became the measure of the self and Sandage points out that success has consequently become something of a trope in America’s ideological landscape—often linked to issues of wealth and status.9 Failure, as a designation of human worth, has thus often been a tool for existential formation. Whether one agrees with Sandage’s assessment of capitalism or not, he nonetheless indicates something along the lines of St. Augustine’s theologically informed insight concerning use and enjoyment in relation to people. Great evils are committed when people are regarded (as successes or failures) in terms of their use-value, rather than seeing people in terms of their intrinsic value.

Other writers have considered the category of failure in terms of its ability to challenge and disrupt accepted modes of interpreting the world. Jack Halberstam, in particular, opens up the possibility of regarding failure as a counter-hegemonic strategy.10 And while his work is not in any formal sense theological, it open...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Chapter 1: Theologies of Failure
• Part 1: Failing Well
• Part 2: Failing Better
• Part 3: Failure as Resistance
• Part 4: Failure and Liberation